RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines

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estebanana

Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to RobF)

There's always someone in the market to buy baloney. The 1970s in guitar making was the golden age of baloney. There was a lot of mythology in the air. The more empirical work of the 90s and aughts cleared out much of it, but wow, players will still write checks to baloney if the baloney is well seasoned. :)

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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 3:24:23

Richard Jernigan

Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to estebanana)

quote:

ORIGINAL: estebanana
but wow, players will still write checks to baloney if the baloney is well seasoned. :)

Then there's the obverse, buying a good guitar from someone who talks baloney to a greater or lesser extent.

When Jose Ramirez III learned I was a mathematician/physicist/engineer by trade, he began to regale me with his mathematical theory of guitar design. From what I could make out, it was nothing but pure numerology and superstition. Still, his shop made some of the best guitars of the '60s and '70s. I bought about a dozen of them, brought them to the USA, sold them for less than Jim Sherry did, and still made a profit, accounting for the expense of the trips to Spain.

I ended up never keeping one for myself. The '67 blanca was a present from my wife. I just put new strings on it, and really enjoyed playing it for a couple of hours.

RNJ

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 4:15:50

estebanana

Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to Richard Jernigan)

It all comes down to guitar makers just being honest about the work. It's still highly intuitive, built on a basic worked out system, and still mysterious. The best makers I know and know of who are empirical data keepers and testers say that at the end of the day. Guitar making is more about averages of good sounding guitars. Someone who is consistent is just lucky and has some groove through lots of practice.

The difference between you Richard, and a vast majority of check writers, is that you are hip to the showbiz of baloney sales and you see through it. I get the impression you have healthy skepticism, but concurrently are amused by the pitch. You smell the baloney, but pay for the guitar. You're more unusual than not. Speaking for myself I've steered clear of trend and gimmick; I have to be true to my own interior sense, baloney is not on my internal radar. Thus outwardly I have low tolerance for shuck and jive mofos. For me there are more than enough makers, so the ones who interest me far and away are the honest ones who admit it's mysterious and just a daily slog through yourself.

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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 6:39:14

Richard Jernigan

Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to estebanana)

One of my all time favorite scenes in a movie is in "MacArthur." Truman has called MacArthur to Honolulu to chew him out for insubordination. MacArthur shows up late, chauffeured in a brilliant red Buick convertible. They go into this big hangar to talk. After they sit down at the table MacArthur gets out his corn cob pipe and says, "Mr. President, may I smoke?"

Truman replies, "Go right ahead General, I've probably had more smoke blown in my face than any other man on earth."

But when I was a kid and heard the story from my Dad and his pals, Truman said, "...blown up my butt..."

On the whole, I suspected Jose III of actually believing his theories. I didn't think he was intentionally BSing me, even though what he said was pretty much pure baloney. I haven't played a '60s Ramirez 1a in decades. I wonder what I would think now?

I bought a cedar/cocobolo classical guitar from Arturo Huipe in Paracho at the end of 2006. I knew that some of the talk he was pitching me had to be BS, but it didn't bother me that much. There's a good deal of smoke and mirrors in that town. As my old buddy Gary R. said about the Balinese, "The truth is not in them." It was the 2nd best guitar I played that day, and I liked Arturo. He was a nice kid. But I ended up not playing the guitar very much.

Last year I gave it to the Austin Classical Guitar Society. They lent it to a high school student, who used it to audition for college. In the silent video that played while the audience trickled in for the recent concert by Adam Del Monte and Mak Grgic, there was a clip of a young woman. In the subtitles she said she had passed her audition for the University of Texas Butler School of Music using a guitar ACGS had lent her, then the Society gave it to her. In the video she was holding the Huipe, so I guess it served a useful purpose.

James Greenberg of Zavaleta's Casa de Guitarras sold a few Huipes several years ago. He gave me an appraisal for nearly twice what I paid for mine in 2006, so my income tax charitable deduction made up for about 3/4 of the price.

The other guitar I bought in Paracho was a spruce/Brazilian from Abel Garcia, which I ordered the next day, and waited nearly two years for. Garcia and I talked about guitars in general and the one I ordered for more than an hour. I believe every word he said was the gospel truth. I had independent verification for much of it. It's one of the two classicals I play the most.

I bought the Arcangel Fernandez blanca from a dealer who was giving off strong indications of going broke. I was living in the Marshall Islands and he wouldn't ship it to me on approval. Cash on the barrelhead, or no deal. I asked Richard Brune if he would appraise it. He said yes, but he had experienced issues with the dealer in the past, so things might or might not go smoothly.

The dealer said Brian Cohen, the highly reputable British maker and dealer had gotten the Arcangel is a 3-guitar deal from a collector. I called up Cohen, who verified a fairly similar story. Cohen asked me whether I was satisfied with the dealer's financial condition. I said no, but I was planning to have Brune appraise the guitar. Cohen said he thought that was a good choice.

I finally persuaded the dealer to ship the guitar to Brune (I paid). Brune said it was authentic, and in absolutely mint, unplayed condition. The dealer accepted about 5% less than Brune's appraisal. I had Brune pack it and ship it. When I took the guitar out of its case, tuned it up and played an E-major chord, it knocked my socks off. I have loved it ever since.

The dealer did go broke fairly soon afterward. Several years later he still hadn't managed to sell the Cohen copy of Torres's ornate masterpiece FE08.

I spent 43 years in a very competitive business. I don't have to trust a person I do business with if I can arrange adequate safeguards. When I do trust someone, I employ Ronald Reagan's maxim about dealing with the Soviets, "Trust, but verfify."

RNJ

(To be clear, I disagreed strongly with Reagan's social and fiscal policies, and I thought the Iran-Contra business was crooked as a snake's back, and conducted with astonishing amateurism, but I respected and admired Reagan's and Secretary of State George Schultz's negotiations with Gorbachev and Schevardnadze, in the face of strong and vocal opposition from Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and CIA Director James Casey, negotiations which eventually contributed to the end of the Soviet Union.)

Torres FE08 (or maybe a copy):

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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 6:59:50

estebanana

Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to Richard Jernigan)

quote:

On the whole, I suspected Jose III of actually believing his theories. I didn't think he was intentionally BSing me, even though what he said was pretty much pure baloney. I haven't played a '60s Ramirez 1a in decades. I wonder what I would think now?

I think the Ramirez line from that era is basically good, but with a few stellar guitars emerging just because the peak instruments above the averages. There are some still born duds, and most are average, and then a few are sublime.

Phillip Roshegar was an acquaintance of mine and I almost knew him well enough to call him a drinking buddy. He was an outstanding guitarist who had some chemical dependency issues. He won the 1968 Santiago de Compostela Segovia competition and was a student of Jose Tomas. He was a brilliant guitar player and I loved hanging out with him. He told me he played every guitar in the Ramirez shop for a few weeks and narrowed it down to two guitars. He won the privilege of picking his guitar at the Ramirez shop as part of the Segovia prize. He said most of them were good guitars, but two in particular were special. And he told me around 2004 that he still waffled back and forth on his pick. He said the other one was great too. Phil had a really profound Ramirez with a cedar top and he played it beautifully. He loved to play our flamenco guitars too, and he would reel off Bach or a Spanish chestnut on one of my new guitars. Spoiled or privileged I can't tell, but sure miss miss Phil and him playing my guitars, or his Ramirez. He was one of the last great rest stroke players!

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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 11:11:51

Fred Klinge

Posts: 100
Joined: Aug. 1 2013
From: Abita Springs, Louisiana

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to estebanana)

quote:

Spoiled or privileged I can't tell, but sure miss miss Phil and him playing my guitars, or his Ramirez.

Love his piece, "Serenade". Simple, beautiful, elegant....

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 11:46:49

Paul Magnussen

Posts: 1805
Joined: Nov. 8 2010
From: London (living in the Bay Area)

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to estebanana)

quote:

Someone who is consistent is just lucky and has some groove through lots of practice.

I was once told (with what truth I don’t know) that in the earlier part of the 20th century, Spanish makers used to place frets by experience, rather than calculating where they should go, and that was why some guitars were off.

In the early ’70s, before everyone and his dog had their own computer, I was working as a programmer for IBM. My then teacher, Julian Byzantine, passed on to me a request from José Romanillos, who had had some orders for instruments with unusual scale-lengths. He asked if it would be possible for me to work out the right fret-positions mathematically, which of course I could.

So I snuck some time on the mainframe, and produced a listing of all the fret-positions, to two decimal places, for a wide variety of scale-lengths, and passed it on to José via Julian.

The last time I saw José, I asked him if he remembered that. He told me he still had the listing.

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 16:01:41

Tom Blackshear

Posts: 2304
Joined: Apr. 15 2008

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to Paul Magnussen)

I remember buying a Jose' Ramirez classical guitar in his Madrid shop in 1965. At that time the scale was good above the 12th fret. But the Miguel Rodriguez guitars, in Cordoba Spain, were a little off, and had to be corrected later on by Yuris Zeltins, Pepe Romero's main repairman in California.

Later, Pepe Rodriguez, (Miguel's son), corrected the scale on his highly prized guitars.

It was crazy how the prices shot up when Spain joined the Common Market

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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 17:37:25

RobF

Posts: 1611
Joined: Aug. 24 2017

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to Paul Magnussen)

Considering the age many makers would have been when starting their apprenticeships, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of them never calculated anything ever. I've often wondered if some might have just been given a nice set of dividers as a rite of passage and would then use them as the starting point to set themselves up with the necessary tools for the remaining measures. Really, just use the dividers to make a set of proportional dividers to establish the first fret position using the rule of 18, then use a homemade straight edge, the smaller dividers and pencil to do the rest.

I’m just speculating, of course - it’s fun. But there is a display case of some of Esteso’s tools at Felipe Conde’s shop in Madrid containing plantilla templates, neck taper templates, headplate templates, a neck angle jig that made me wonder if he sometimes built top up like Tom does, a drill powered by an old sword, some peghole reamers, and a nice set of dividers. :)

Thanks for posting your interview with Gilbert, BTW, it was enjoyable reading :)

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 19:14:26

Richard Jernigan

Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to Tom Blackshear)

quote:

ORIGINAL: Tom Blackshear
It was crazy how the prices shot up when Spain joined the Common Market

In 1991 I bought a spruce/Brazilian "doble tapa" (it has an additional spruce back inside) from Manuel Contreras Sr. He told me that when the 14% IVA (value added tax) came in the next year, he was raising his prices 14%.

"Pero Maestro," I said, "la guitarra se ve como imprescindible para la cultura. El IVA no aplicará." [The guitar is seen as an essential element of culture. The tax won't apply.]

He replied that everything he bought was going up, so his prices were too.

I left out an important part of the Arcangel Fernandez story. After Brune received the instrument he emailed me. The guitar was authentic, condition was mint, etc. but he hadn't written up the appraisal yet. He added, "I really like this guitar. I hope you won't mind, but I have played it for a couple of hours."

I had already decided to buy it if Brune's appraisal was favorable. The last time I heard Sabicas he was playing an Arcangel. It sounded fabulous. But Brune's comment made me even more determined.

RNJ

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 19:46:39

Escribano

Posts: 6415
Joined: Jul. 6 2003
From: England, living in Italy

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to Paul Magnussen)

quote:

So I snuck some time on the mainframe, and produced a listing of all the fret-positions, to two decimal places, for a wide variety of scale-lengths, and passed it on to José via Julian.

Great story! 3090 series? Was the listing on punched, green-lined 'music stave' paper?

I was on DEC 2060 and VAX/PDPs in the late 70s. That's where I started.

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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 20:26:08

Paul Magnussen

Posts: 1805
Joined: Nov. 8 2010
From: London (living in the Bay Area)

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to Escribano)

quote:

Great story! 3090 series? Was the listing on punched, green-lined 'music stave' paper?

3090 series? That was 1985!

This was a System/370, and the paper did have sprocket-holes, and alternate white and pale-green stripes. The printer, if memory serves, would have been a 1403.

The programming language was PL/I, which was fairly new then. I always loved it; but IBM blew it in the 1990s by not marketing an object-oriented version. I was told that management thought object-orientation was just an industry fad that would pass.

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 21:20:51

Richard Jernigan

Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to Escribano)

Hey, I'm the real dinosaur here. I took the only programming course the University of Texas (at Austin) offered in 1963. We started out with assembly language on a CDC1604, and went on to FORTRAN.

After that I got a contract to do a solo project for the Registrar's Office on an IBM 704. I had to learn COBOL for it. The 704 had drum memory, and was the first mass produced machine with floating point arithmetic.

I was working in the Registrar's Office one weekend, sharing the machine with an IBM repair tech. He was getting qualified for the higher paying job as System Programmer. He read his first punched card deck into the machine, looked at the output, and started pulling panels off the machine.

I said, "Hey, what's going on?"

He pointed to an obvious wrong result on the printout.

I told him, " 999 times out of 1,000 the problem is in the code. You don't start taking the machine apart looking for a software bug."

It took a while, but I finally convinced him. He was a sharp guy who moved up in the company.

After that I worked for the Computation Center, on the procurement of the University's first super-computer, a CDC 6600, and at the Linguistics Research Center on an IBM 7044. The LRC was among the earliest organizations to tackle machine translation of natural language. A friend of ours, a fellow Math grad student, asked my good buddy Dave S. what was the state of the art.

Dave responded, "If you had a machine with infinite memory, and which could do everything at once, nobody would know how to program it to translate languages."

There's been a good deal of progress on that in the last 50 years, having abandoned attempts to implement Chomsky's generative grammar approach, instead using more or less brute force methods.

Some time in the late 1990s a woman I knew at Kwajalein complained that her employer was changing from Apple computers to Windows machines, and it was a pain to learn the new system. She was a mature, intelligent, hard working person, the Boss's Administrative Assistant.

I told her that over the years I had learned 11 computer operating systems, all but two of them command line types like VMS and Unix. In that context, Mac and Windows were the same thing....and I was just an engineer, not a computer guy.

RNJ

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 21:41:21

Paul Magnussen

Posts: 1805
Joined: Nov. 8 2010
From: London (living in the Bay Area)

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to Richard Jernigan)

quote:

Hey, I'm the real dinosaur here.

You win, Richard: you’re marginally more of a dinosaur than I am.

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 22:05:44

jshelton5040

Posts: 1500
Joined: Jan. 17 2005

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to RobF)

quote:

ORIGINAL: RobF

I see lattice bracing as just one of the many options available to a maker. Decide you’ve worked a cedar top thinner than you’d like? Put a lattice on it and buy back a few millimeters.

This makes perfect sense. I've only played 2 or 3 lattice guitars and found them loud with good projection but tonally uninteresting. No criticism intended but if I felt a top was too thin, I'd throw it in the burning bin.

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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 22:16:50

Mark2

Posts: 1871
Joined: Jul. 12 2004
From: San Francisco

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to Fred Klinge)

Thank you-simply exquisite. With all the technique and fireworks in flamenco guitar, it's still true that a piece like this can have an amazing impact.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Fred Klinge

quote:

Spoiled or privileged I can't tell, but sure miss miss Phil and him playing my guitars, or his Ramirez.

Love his piece, "Serenade". Simple, beautiful, elegant....

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 22:25:14

estebanana

Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to estebanana)

Mac and windows are the same thing. I used to say that in the 1990s at the height of the great Mac-Windows wars. I remember people with signs on their desks that read like the Hatfield's and the McCoy's- you dad blasted muckty muck Mac users best keep your damn distance with that fruity tooty stuff, or else!

Or the unix snobs in the office, well if you had any integrity or know how, you'd be able to do that in unix.

This was a college.

Anyway,

Phil was a great composer. I'll see if I can work up a list of the contemporary artists who play his peices. He should be more known- unfortunately a great many of his manuscripts were destroyed by the weather when he was homeless, but I think some if it was recovered. Before that there were perhaps half dozen works that artists were recording and taking into concerts. He was a composer on par with people like Andrew York etc.

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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 23:15:12

estebanana

Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to jshelton5040)

Re John on lattice-

The big aural lie of our age is that loud means better. In everything from classical singers to guitars. Especially singers and guitars, niether need to be loud, but the creation of large concert halls forced the human voice and the voice of the guitar to be blown up.

In opera they've reevaluatated the situation because high level singers like Kathleen battle ****ed their own instruments over at high cost to themselves and their recording companies and agents. Guitars continue to be blown up because there is no human cost, it's just a pile of sticks.

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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 23:29:03

RobF

Posts: 1611
Joined: Aug. 24 2017

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to jshelton5040)

Hi John, I would never rubbish a top that I thought was marginal for a fan braced strategy if I feel it’s perfectly well suited for lattice. I personally lean towards the sound of a fan braced guitar and I really don’t like the nasal quality that some lattice guitars can have, but time and time again I’ve seen players, with no knowledge of the bracing scheme, gravitate towards lattice guitars over equally loud and good sounding fans precisely because they liked the evenness and punch that some would find uninteresting or boring.

It’s just different strokes for different folks, I guess. My personal preference is towards fan, but I’ll continue to do both. I’m not rich enough to burn tops, the wood will get used somehow, if only for soundhole and bridge patches and the like.

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 23:33:44

Paul Magnussen

Posts: 1805
Joined: Nov. 8 2010
From: London (living in the Bay Area)

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to estebanana)

quote:

Or the unix snobs in the office, well if you had any integrity or know how, you'd be able to do that in unix.

O course, Macs these days are Unix.

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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 23:34:50

RobF

Posts: 1611
Joined: Aug. 24 2017

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to estebanana)

quote:

The big aural lie of our age is that loud means better

Once again, I agree with Estabananaman. It seems impossible to go anywhere in my city without being aurally assualted at ridiculous volumes by someone else’s idea of what you should be listening to. How about nothing? Lol.

To make matters worse, the city decided to license busking and as long as you pay the man they’ll provide free power so you can now clear entire city blocks with your whatever. If I hear one more twit crooning “please come to Baaston in the (freaking) summertime” two blocks before I can even see the guy I’m going to have to pack up and move. It’s crazy. Mind you, if I were American I probably would move to Boston. I really like that place...

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 5 2018 23:54:10

estebanana

Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to estebanana)

There's a musical reason why players want a more punchy blocky sound that some lattice designs give. It has to do with the articulation of chords and the stacking of intervals in transcriptions. The articulation possible with the lattice designs can be less romantically idiomatic to the guitar. There are other string sounds like Harp and piano which don't have the idiomatic tendency of the guitar to change timbre as much across the range of sonority on the fretboard.

Lattice designs tend to flatten out or equalize the range of timbre for the musical purpose of clarity especially in chordal playing. So I see a reason for it, but it's not as compelling for me to seek. But I get it, it's been presented to me this way by Marc Tiecholtz when I visited him. He played his Redgate and then his Pepe Jr and my guitars and expained why he sometimes needed the Redgate instead of the romantic Spanish sound. A lot if it had to do with repertoire, transcription and concert venue, what the music needs. So he set it up like a tool, even though he admitted he had a fondness for the romantic idiomatic sound, he often needs something more like a Bosendorfer piano.

From a high level pro, who am I to argue. He taught me a great deal that day.

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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 6 2018 1:15:27

Richard Jernigan

Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to RobF)

quote:

ORIGINAL: RobF

Once again, I agree with Estabananaman. It seems impossible to go anywhere in my city without being aurally assualted at ridiculous volumes by someone else’s idea of what you should be listening to. How about nothing? Lol.

The one thing I could not accustom myself to when we went to the Universal Studios amusement park in Orlando was the noise.

They probably called it music, but it wasn't. It was noise. Played at high volume over a very low quality but totally pervasive sound system, it came out as unintelligibly distorted garbage. The bump-bump-bump-bump bass beat was the only thing that always came through. Standing in line you would see a few people mindlessly twitching more or less in time to it, seeming to be totally unaware of what they were doing.

Complaining to Larisa, I suggested that the proprietors had probably done studies to see which noises most stimulated the desired responses in the mob. But since they had only the bluntest of measurement tools, the lowest expectation of the victims' responses, and the least informed musical taste, they produced only the crudest of noises, in mind numbing monotony.

In case you hadn't noticed, I didn't like it.

RNJ

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 6 2018 2:14:56

constructordeguitarras

Posts: 1674
Joined: Jan. 29 2012
From: Seattle, Washington, USA

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to Richard Jernigan)

The main reason I don't like to shop at big local hardware stores is the loud (to me) music they constantly play, which makes it hard for me to even remember what I was looking for, let alone think. So I order online a lot.

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I always have flamenco guitars available for sale.

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 6 2018 2:21:28

Richard Jernigan

Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to estebanana)

quote:

ORIGINAL: estebanana

...it's been presented to me this way by Marc Tiecholtz when I visited him....

From a high level pro, who am I to argue. He taught me a great deal that day.

Teicholz appears quite a bit on Guitar Salon International's web site, playing instruments they have for sale--some by very prestigious makers of the past or present. GSI's sample recordings are usually pretty good, sounding fairly realistic. Of course, no recording actually sounds like the real thing.

To me Teicholz seems to make the guitars sound more like one another, with an aggressive right hand touch, as though he were aiming for the back row of a big auditorium. Other players go for a more lyrical, tonally varied approach.

But as you said, who am I to argue with a high level pro?

RNJ

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 6 2018 2:26:17

estebanana

Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to estebanana)

Get your eras around his Valse CD which he recorded with many different guitars. His complete recordings of Sor are amazing too.

You'll enjoy this comrade, or else! https://www.guitarsalon.com/store/p3655-valseana-by-marc-teicholz-and-gsi.html

______________________________________________________________________________________________

We have a noise filled environment today- it's still quieter here in Japan, the rural areas are still not polluted. You hear the trains thundering on its track right after 7pm and most cars are off the road.

But noise and the competition guitar makers give it and the big auditorium phenomena is a non starter for me. Eventually the madness will abate and guitar makers will realize making LOUD guitars is dumb and not needed. First the 'classical' guitar world will have to join the human race and drop its purity for purities sake aesthetic of not using the best tool we have called a microphone.

Eventually guitar makers will be able to just make guitars again instead of speaker cones housed in guitar shaped precious wood cabinets. When classical guitarists finally enter the 20th century and take to electricity, hot food, automobiles, super sonic aircraft, deep sea submersibles, computers, cameras, telescopes, electron microscopy, the polio vaccine and a host of other modern ideas and things that developed concurrently with the modern electric microphone, that every other kind of musician uses, we'll be in better shape and won't have to build LOUD for LOUD sake.

Opera singers realized that screaming and singing are different activities; after the bel canto singing style had been left behind in order to blow up the voice into a LOUD making machine lot's of singers trashed out their voices. There's been a return to older wisdom in the opera world that bigger is not better, and focus is more important. That discussion is can of worms, because there's a lot of subjectivity on what constitutes good sound and projection, but a direction away from manufacturing big voices has certainly been taken up in recent years as a remedy to the way some singers over cast their voices. I see some correlation in guitar making, but as I said earlier the guitar is not human tissue and it does not have vocal folds or musculature around its larynx and voice producing tissues. So the guitar can be ground into the dirt without any harm coming to the tissue that a human wold recoil from, or would lead to degradation of the voice. Guitars are just things made of wood, but if they were sentient and could talk back I'm pretty sure they would say stop with the aural lie of making us have blown up voices. It hurts.

If guitars had nervous systems and larynxes I'm certian they would be saying F-you to half the makers who birth them. Like Saruman breeding orcs.

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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 6 2018 3:01:40

Tom Blackshear

Posts: 2304
Joined: Apr. 15 2008

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to estebanana)

quote:

and a host of other modern ideas and things that developed concurrently with the modern electric microphone, that every other kind of musician uses, we'll be in better shape and won't have to build LOUD for LOUD sake.

Crazy but true... when I heard a inexpensive Japanese guitar played on a huge sound system at the San Antonio fair one year I thought, WOW! what a sound, but then walked across the park to another venue where a flamenco player used a 50's style small sound box and viola!

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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 6 2018 9:33:01

RobF

Posts: 1611
Joined: Aug. 24 2017

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to estebanana)

One of the makers my first teacher studied under was Patt Lister, who had been experimenting with using lattice to brace guitars as early as the mid 60’s. My teacher encouraged me to draw my own bracing plans but emphasized the importance of structural integrity and form. While the ‘Australian school” and Smallman were discussed, the use of lattice was not presented as being intrinsically tied to them.

My second teacher, who is on a different continent and has never met my first, also uses lattice on occasion, but again as an all wood bracing strategy without taking it into the territory of carbon reinforcements or ultra thin tops. My understanding was it was done primarily with structure and tonality in mind.

The impression I was given by both teachers is that they regarded lattice as just another way to brace a top to achieve a goal. And in both cases the the goal simply was to make beautiful looking and sounding guitars that people will want to play and hear.

I think it’s all good, different guitars can serve different masters.

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 6 2018 11:11:31

estebanana

Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to estebanana)

Some Japanese makers messed around with lattice early on too. But I think the breakaway is the Smallman concept because it goes beyond using lattice and changes the structure to being highly static. That's the game changer.

Even the cello, or I should say definitely the cello and bass depend on a flexible body structure to sound beautiful. The ribs on a cello are 1.5 to 1.8 thick -really thin! It's because they vibrate. The back is also thin compared to its size. The Smallman concept is even backwards from the cello, which looks stiff and tight, but it's not. It's closer to a flamenco guitar in how it works than an arch top guitar or stiff bodied classical guitar.

So the active rib - back vs. the static more or less, model is a big factor.

You can put lattice braced tops on the active structure and you still are in Spanish sound territory. Drop that on a static structure and it's something else. And also unlike a cello.

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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 6 2018 12:20:38

RobF

Posts: 1611
Joined: Aug. 24 2017

RE: Gilbert Tuning Machines (in reply to Tom Blackshear)

- Give them loud and they’ll call it tone.

I don’t know who it was who originally said that, but for some reason I think I read Alan Carruth say it somewhere. But I don’t recall. It sure seems to apply sometimes, however, lol.

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 6 2018 12:36:00